Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill

Vendler argues that when facing an approaching death that means not immortality but personal extinction, poets find themselves compelled to write from a point of view that she terms "binocular style," a style that attempts to "do justice to both the looming presence of death and the unabated vitality of spirit" (1). Later in the book, Vendler performs a similarly binocular reading of Stevens' earlier "Burghers of Petty Death" (from Transport to Summer) as a belated elegy for Stevens' father and mother, from whom he had sadly become estranged. [...]as Vendler 's reading makes clear, while the youthful Sylvia Plath was finding a style and an individual voice even as she contemplated ending her own life, the other poets - Lowell, Bishop, and Merrill - had long since established their inimitable poetic identities. [...]as with Stevens, each had only to adapt a fluent personal idiom to the arresting new circumstance of impending death. [...]what Vendler does give us in Last Looks, Last Books is a distinctive, courageous, and compelling volume, a study that takes a fresh look at both familiar and less familiar poems and that suggests new ways of reading Stevens and many of Stevens' finest successors as they focus on one of the core conditions of human experience.